


Forces of Nature

by seekingsquake



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Feels, Bruce Needs a Hug, Earthquakes, F/M, Hulk Smash, It was never going to work, Ocean, Storms, Volcanoes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-01-26 11:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1686029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty five years is a long time to be at opposite ends, but the earth and the ocean never did play well together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a thing that has been in my brain for a while. Criticism is much appreciated.  
> All characters are property of Marvel.  
> Please do not repost or reupload this piece anywhere without consent. If you ask, I'm sure we can work something out :]

Bruce had always been a force of nature, even before the incident that brought the Hulk to devastating life. His genius had been hard to contain in those days, loud and fast and sharp, like Tony on a manic upswing except all the time. Sometimes his thoughts zipped around faster than his hands or mouth could keep up with, and half finished equations and experiments hung around him like the fashion jewelry his aunt used to wear in abundance. Nothing about Bruce had ever been soft, but the urgency that cloaked all his actions took a lot of the edge off him. He would lash out sometimes if he hadn't eaten or slept in a few days, or if there was a science problem that refused to allow him to solve it, but most people chalked it up to him working too hard and he never meant to cause harm to anyone. He was the first to offer sincere apologies and self deprecating smiles, and he was usually forgiven without any fuss. He wasn't soft, but he wasn't quite hard either. He was a steady hand in all the labs he worked in, always willing to stay late and lend assistance, and though sometimes the university students he taught tasted his temper as if it were a physical thing, they all knew that he was the best professor they'd ever have. One student in Bruce's first class had called him a volcano personified.

But if Bruce was a volcanic island adrift in the middle of the sea, Betty Ross was the water that surrounded him.

Betty had been raised as a little girl to be calm and ladylike in all scenarios. She was taught early on that strategy had more value than feelings, that gut intuitions were to be ignored for data and trends, and that head should always,  _always_ win over heart. It was with those ideals ingrained into her that she pursued science. 

Betty had never loved science, it just fit with the mindset she'd worked so hard to believe was her own. She breezed through all things academic, and no one was surprised to find young Miss Ross headed for Harvard. Everything was following the plan she'd laid out for herself and she was proud of that. Until she met a boy who changed everything.

Bruce Banner was a scholarship student, and he worked his ass off to prove to everyone that he was just as good, and probably better, than all the rich kids in his program. He spent more time in the library studying than he spent anywhere doing anything else, and in the library was exactly where he was when Betty Ross first saw him. He had fallen asleep over a thick textbook, his chin dropped to his chest, dark curls in his eyes and glasses slipping down his nose. A pencil was still held in his fingers, lead to the page of his notebook and at the ready. His other hand was spread out over the open pages of the text, fingers lax and curled slightly.

She had never believed in something as juvenile as love at first sight, but when his tired eyes blinked open and she caught a glimpse of what she thought might be the whole universe in the depths of those dark orbs, her breath caught in her throat and Betty wondered if she'd been wrong. 

She'd joined him at that library table that evening, and they'd talked for hours. About everything and nothing, science and life. It wasn't hard to see that Bruce was her opposite. He loved science with a burning passion that she couldn't compare anything to, and it drew her in completely. He loved science and food and the idea of freedom, and he hated purposeful ignorance and rom-coms and jalapenos with the same scorching enthusiasm. He believed that if you didn't feel strongly about it then what was the fucking point, and she walked back to her dorm that night feeling like she'd experienced some sort of spiritual revelation.

It was through riding the highs and lows of Bruce's temper and quiet self loathing that they discovered that underneath all of Betty's brains and strategies, she had a volatile streak that was just as vicious as his. It was like an Atlantic storm that threatened to break past the steep cliffs of her cheekbones, wind howling past the bluffs of her soft lips, and their first fight had her waves crashing against his shorelines until the lava of his anger erupted and sizzled against her. The smoke from the collision of their forces left them unable to look each other in the eye for nearly a week. Then the sunlight of her smile and the breeze of her forgiveness brought calm back to his smouldering beaches, and they promised each other to not let that disaster happen again. Of course it did though, because Betty was all head and Bruce was all heart and the only thing they had ever learned was how to tear things apart. Trying to force two destructive forces to work together to create instead of destroy was hard. They had somehow built each other up slightly more often than they tore each other down, but their relationship had already been scarred and tarnished due to the years of patch-jobs and rebuilding by the time the Hulk came and ripped everything to shreds. 

Though Bruce's anger only made occasional appearances in his everyday life, it was constantly simmering just beneath the surface of his skin. It'd been like that for as long as he could remember; the hot burn of anger covering the immense and overwhelming fear that had been instilled in him as a child. But when the military experiment went wrong, when every cell in his body revolted against him and turned him into something he wouldn't ever be able to recognize, the immobilizing fear and it's enraged mask couldn't stay beneath his skin any longer because it wasn't even his own skin anymore. This new, giant, green Bruce had tried to smash his way through Bruce's normal body and then through the concrete walls of the lab, but Betty's gale force winds had stepped between him and escape. 

Where Bruce's instincts had been bred to run, to hide, to flee, Betty's had been cultivated to face all issues, all enemies, head on. Betty and Bruce had been opposites from day one, and not even in the face of their worst nightmare could they see through the smoke and stand on the same side.

Betty had thought her sunshine smile and sea breeze eyes would somehow calm the volcanic gamma explosion that her lovely island had turned into, but her gentleness had fallen on ears deafened by terror. The storm that was always concentrated behind her lashes broke through and she'd screamed, "You better give me Bruce back, you asshole!"

And the disaster that now stood in Bruce's place roared, "Bruce not here anymore!" and smashed through Betty's tsunami heart as if it were nothing. He broke her, and he broke Bruce, and the island crumpled into the sea and was swallowed by the ocean as if it had never even been there to start with.

When Bruce woke up back in his squishy pink body, he was naked and alone in a crater on the side of a road somewhere in Connecticut. He sat up and knew in the pit of his being that the terrible thing he had been before had gone and given way to something else. He now carried an earthquake under his skin, and earthquakes had the tendency to be more devastating that isolated volcanic islands.

Years passed slowly, and Bruce eventually learned how to monitor the way the ground shook and crumbled underfoot everywhere he went. He contained and stifled and monitored, and became much like Betty had been before they met and rubbed off on one another. He was learning to be like Betty without being near Betty, and he stayed as far away from the ocean as he could.

The Harlem Incident was a step back for him, because he had almost convinced himself that maybe her waters were deep enough to hide his cracking fault lines, but he had almost drowned in her blue forgiveness and the foundation of his sanity still trembled and shook the ground around him. He dragged himself back from her waters and was on the run again, pretending that he didn't sip salt water whenever he could in an attempt to feel her lips on his.

Five more years passed, and with the help of literal gods, billionaires, and actual heroes, Bruce was beginning to feel less like a walking force of devastation and more like useful destruction. Maybe he could be a wrecking ball instead of an earthquake, maybe he could be a bundle of T and T with a controlled detonator instead of a volcanic eruption. The Avengers were willing to give it a shot, and though he was nervous, he had nothing left to lose. For the first time in nearly twenty five years, Bruce felt free of the salt and the storm that his life had revolved around. He'd first tasted the ocean at nineteen, and now at forty three he thought maybe he could wade into fresh water without feeling like some sort of traitor. The thing about the ocean though, is that it surrounds everything. All paths lead you back to it eventually, so he shouldn't have been surprised when one afternoon even the fresh water dragged him right back to kneel inside the waves of Betty Ross's storm. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for the delayed update. This was really difficult for me to write, and it felt like a beast. But here it is, finally.

She was standing against the wall to wall, floor to ceiling window in the middle of Bruce’s living room, her eyes alight with rage and her tongue sharpened and dipped in venom. He was behind the kitchen island, fists curled tight and pressed harshly against the marble countertop. Both their bodies were pulled tight with tension, and his breaths were coming in controlled drags of air through his nostrils as hers sounded in staccato pants. They were both trembling with the effort to not lash out at each other, and he had consciously put himself as far away from her as possible.

Betty had called out of nowhere that morning. She was in town for a conference, she wanted to see him, she’d be at the tower in fifteen minutes. Bruce had had no time to prepare for her, not even time enough on the phone to attempt to dissuade her. He knew it’d be like this, knew that they’d fight and hurt each other and regret the whole stupid thing, but as much as he’d known, part of him craved it. She always knew how to push him, how to make him feel, really feel, and he needed that. He missed that. And as much as he hated it, he missed her too.

But now here she was, and here he was, and he was choking on all the terrible things he wanted to say to her and bound to utter stillness by the intense desire to smash something. He wondered, not for the first time, if he really was the sick, twisted little monster wrapped in human skin just like his father had always told him he was. Betty was beautiful and smart and he shouldn’t want to hurt her. But he did, God he did, and it sent painful twinges through his limbs and made him feel nauseous.

“You’re a fucking coward!” Betty’s voice rang out, shattering the brief silence that had crashed over them. “You’ve always been a fucking coward and I can’t fucking take it anymore!”

“Then don’t!” he snapped back at her, poison lacing his tone. “I didn’t ask you to come here. I didn’t call you. You sought me out, remember? It’s always you coming to me! If you can’t take it, then leave me alone!”

“I’m not going to let you keep running away! I’m not going to let you keep dragging me around like this!”

“I’m not dragging you anywhere!” Bruce erupted. “I’ve been alone this whole goddamn time, I’ve left you out of this whole mess as much as humanly possible! Were you with me in Bella Coola? Were you with me in Brazil? Greenland? Bosnia? No! You were home, safe, getting fucked by that psychologist and teaching college kids how to think in a way that will make them useful tools for the government. I didn’t drag you anywhere!”

“Oh, that’s not fair-,”

“That’s not fair? No, you know what isn’t fair? The fact that you got to move on with your life while your father chased me around the world trying to kill me!”

A sharp pang of laughter burst past her lips, laughter like gunfire, and before he could really process what was happening Betty had taken the black heel off of her left foot and hurled it across the room at him. He ducked as it zipped past his head, and it hit the cabinet behind him and clattered to the floor. “Fuck you,” she hissed as she advanced forward, following the path across the room that her shoe had taken and stalking toward him. “Fuck you, you selfish bastard!” She reached the island and grabbed the abandoned glass of water that had been sitting on the counter, then hurled that at his head too. He ducked again and it shattered behind him with a crash that made him shudder.

“If you cut me open, you’ll probably die of radiation poisoning, you idiot,” he spat as he carefully shuffled around the island and away from the smattering of glass shards and water. The move brought him closer to her, and he eyed her with a sharp wariness.

She laughed again, and it felt like bombs going off behind his teeth. “Or maybe it’d turn me into a lady-Hulk and you wouldn’t have to be so afraid of yourself anymore. Maybe it would make my temper just as fucking violent as yours is, like it used to be back in school. We could fight it out again, just like old times. I bet you’d like that, huh?”

“Shut up!” he screamed, his hands slamming the countertop. “Don’t you dare talk like that! Are you crazy? You’ve always been so stupid, Betty, goddamnit. You think I like doing this? You think this is fun for me? Huh?”

“I think it makes you feel alive,” she responded, not missing a beat but struggling for breath.

It was his laugh this time, that danced like acid across the curves of her cheeks. “I don’t even know what that means. I’ve been dead my whole fucking life.”

Her hand cracked across the line of his cheekbone with a sound that reminded him of the snapping of support beams. The pain flashed red and hot behind his eyes, but before he could say or do anything, before the Other Guy could roar to life, Betty’s voice, low and dark like nightmares, careened into his chest. “I will not let you make all those years I loved you mean nothing. You were alive then, Bruce. We were alive together. You took everything I ever wanted away from me; I will not let you take those years from me too.”

She had expected that to shut him up, because guilt had always been the way to get him to close his mouth. She had expected to win this fight, because she always used to win, so when Bruce actually snorted she almost twitched. “I took everything from you?” His voice was bitter and quiet, but his eyes were bright and loud. “I took everything from you?” He sounded like he couldn’t even believe that they were having this conversation.

“You-,”

“No,” Bruce interrupted. “no, listen to me. I took everything from you? Fuck you, Betty. You took everything from me.”

Betty sputtered. “What?! Where the fuck did you come up with that idea, huh? That’s preposterous. You were the one-,”

“Who only ever did what you told me to,” Bruce interrupted again. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around her wrists, then pulled her against his chest, their arms trapped between them. He looked into her eyes and she saw anger in him, but more than that she saw pain. Pain and an immense sadness. She'd never seen such sadness in anyone, and the fact that she was seeing it in her Bruce made her heart hurt. His voice was soft when he spoke again. "I wanted to finish school at Harvard, but you were transferring to Culver and didn't want to go alone, so I went with you. I wanted to take that teaching job at NYU but you didn't want to live in the city and didn't want to try doing the long distance thing, so I stayed. I didn’t want to take that military contract but you thought it'd be a good way for me to connect with your father. I don't blame you and I'm not saying it's your fault because how could you have known, but you took just as much away from me as I took from you. I took that contract for you, Betty, and you were in the lab every day, right beside me, working on that serum too. Your handwriting is in my notes. There are your ideas all mixed with mine. You think I would have been able to create that on my own? Not a chance. It wouldn't have been a thing if I hadn't had your help. I took your dream right out from under you, and I wrecked your future with me, but you did it to me, too. You weren't the only one who lost everything that day, Betty, and I'm not the only one at fault." There were tears in his eyes as he whispered, leaning to press his face into her hair, "Please don't make me carry it all alone anymore. You were there too. I know that it's mostly my fault, okay? I know that if I had just been able to say no to you, even just once, none of this would have happened. But we fucked it up together, Betty. You and me, together. It wasn't just me."

She was shaking, and she could feel the stutter of his breath against her scalp. "Bruce-,"

"Please," he sounded broken and it ruined her, "tell me it wasn't just me."

And because Betty Ross didn't know what else to do, she leaned up and pressed a soft kiss to the underside of Bruce's jaw. She could feel how tense he was, all his muscles tight and hard. She turned her wrists in his loosened hold and gently pressed her palms against his chest, feeling the fabric of his shirt with her fingertips. Kisses brushed against his jaw, the soft part under his ear, down the side of his neck, over his collar. Her lips soothed his skin, touching the rage simmering just beneath it and calming it. “It wasn’t just you,” she whispered against the point in his neck where his pulse beat steadily. “None of it has ever been just you.”

Her words, like they always used to when they were young and foolish and oh so in love, broke the wall of Bruce’s self restraint and suddenly his lips were over hers, hard and desperate. She kissed him back roughly, her hands making their way up to twist into his hair and drag him even closer. He devoured her mouth, all nipping teeth and slick tongue, as he lifted her by the hips and deposited her onto the island countertop. The black fabric of her skirt rode up her thighs and rumpled near her hips, and Bruce was standing between her legs, dragging her closer to the edge of the counter and holding her flush against him. His lips left trails of nips and kisses along her throat and over the hard lines of her collarbone, and she tilted her head back and moaned as one of his hands reaquainted itself with the soft curves of her body. Bruce groaned against her skin as she hooked an ankle around the back of his leg and braced her foot against the side of the island, leveraging herself up and  grinding her pelvis against his hips.

She reached a hand between their bodies and down to the bulge in his jeans when the door to his apartment was kicked open and slammed loudly against the wall. Bruce jumped almost out of his skin and was suddenly across the room, pressing his hand firmly against the glass of the window and desperately dragging in deep breaths through his nose. In the doorway stood Iron Man, Thor, and Hawkeye, all suited up and weaponized. The three heroes had frozen in surprise, and Thor slowly lowered Mjolnir to the floor.

“Friend JARVIS alerted us to the fact that you were in distress,” the demigod said slowly, eyes dragging across the room and only landing briefly on the debauched looking woman on the counter before settling on Bruce. “Was that... incorrect?”

Bruce’s fingers curled into fists and then smoothed out against the window, cycling from opened to closed a few times before he was able to rub at his jaw and look at Betty. She had slid off the counter and resettled her skirt back against her legs properly, and was running her fingers through her hair in a nervous attempt to keep busy. Bruce exhaled slowly, and even though he was across the room, she could almost feel his breath ghosting over her skin. She shivered minutely and hid the trembling of her hands by adjusting the way her blouse fell over her bust.

“JARVIS?” Bruce sounded tired, and Betty found that she couldn’t read the expression on his face. That thought bothered her; she used to be able to read him like a book.

“Your heartrate has been in constant flux, dipping into Red Zone levels multiple times since Doctor Ross’s arrival. I understand that you were in the middle of a deeply personal conversation-,”

“That didn’t look like much of a conversation to me,” Clint murmured as he eyed Bruce.

“-and was therefore reluctant to intervene, but you were turning a little green so I called ahead for some assistance.”

Bruce gave a curt nod to everyone and no one in particular, and then ran his hands through his tousled curls and pinched the bridge of his nose. “JARVIS. Next time, call for assistance when there’s the first hint of blood being drawn.”

“Oh course Sir. Though I think you’ll be interested to know that at that point of the interaction your heart rate was at a fairly safe level.”

Betty snorted. “Oh course you’re fine when you’ve got a projectile coming at your face, but sex is a superhero worthy emergency.” There was no heat in her voice and her eyes were soft, if a little exhausted.

Bruce slumped against the window. “We need supervision to get along with each other,” he muttered, watching her in the reflection of the glass. A small smile played on his lips, but it was a little bitter and really more melancholy than anything else. His gaze then moved on to focus on the three men standing in the doorway. He watched them quietly before softly saying, “I sort of need to get through the rest of this conversation for personal reasons, but clearly I can’t control myself so maybe if you could...,”

Thor strode into the room and deposited himself on the couch as if spectating domestic disputes was something he did on a regular basis. Back on Asgard, where all men are warriors and all women are fearsome, maybe it was. Clint hooked his bow over his shoulder and gave the room a sweep with his critical gaze, taking in the broken glass and the way Bruce kept making and releasing fists, and then settled beside Thor, his face blank. Tony and Bruce locked eyes before he dismantled the suit. Bruce was his best friend, and he had told Tony, in brief stories during long nights over the course of their friendship, all about his convoluted feelings for Betty. Guilt, rage, hatred, need, love, fear. He knew Bruce needed closure, and if the only way he could get it was with a group of superheroes supervising, so be it.

“They can stay,” Betty spoke as she crossed the room toward Bruce, “if they promise not to comment.”

Bruce looked at his team, his friends, and he nodded slowly. He knew Thor and Clint wouldn’t have a problem, but Tony would probably have to bite his own tongue off to keep from saying something. He eyed the engineer, but Tony gave him a very silent thumbs up, so Bruce nodded again more firmly. “They promise.”

Betty nodded and stopped in the centre of the room, one hand on her hip and the other rubbing her shoulder. “Okay, so, to recap-,”

“What’s to recap? We’ve been yelling at each other since you got here and I can’t even keep track of what we’re fighting about. All I know is that we’re both pissed at each other.”

Betty sighed. “Bruce, I can’t keep track of my thoughts if you keep interrupting me.”

“I didn’t even want you to come here and tell me your thoughts in the first place!”

“You’re getting worked up.”

Another laugh bubbled up past Bruce’s lips, and Tony shifted uncomfortably. Everyone ignored him. “Sorry, sorry, you’re right. Okay. Calm down.” Bruce pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes and took a few deep breaths, and Betty slowly started walking toward him again. She stopped beside him at the window and curled long fingers around one of his wrists, pulling it away from his face and forcing him to look at her.

They just stared at each other for a long time, breaths soft and mingling. Her fingers stayed loosely wrapped around his wrist, and his other hand reached up to comb through the long strands of her hair. She’d left it down and free around her face because she knew he liked it like that. Similarly, he’d taken extra care while shaving his face because he knew she didn’t care for any sort of stubble. Her fingers skimmed across his jaw and he tried for a smile, but it crumpled before it ever fully formed.

“We should probably try to talk through our feelings,” she whispered as she dropped her face to his chest.

“Like when we were in couples therapy?” There was a hint of amusement in his voice,  but his face was grave.

She nodded against the fabric of his shirt, and her words were muffled and thick with tears and she murmured, “I said some pretty shitty things to you.”

His arms wrapped around her without hesitation, and there was pain in his eyes as he responded, “Hey, none of that. I said worse things to you. Shh. It isn’t your fault. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, please don’t cry. It’s alright. It’s alright.”

“I knew you wouldn’t want me to come here, and I shouldn’t have pushed my way in.”

Bruce didn’t say anything for a long time. He waited for Betty to calm down before he shifted, cupping her chin and turning her face up so that they could look at each other again. “I was scared,” he whispered, his tongue swiping over his lips. They were chapped and red from being bitten. “I was so scared to see you because you.. I always lose my cool around you. And I can’t do that anymore, you know? I need to be calm and have control and when I’m with you I’m...,”

“Bruce, I-,”

“No, shh. Listen. I was always a control freak, and then we met, and you were a control freak too. And, God, I just... I just wanted to give you everything. All the control, everything you ever wanted, all of me, everything. And you swallowed it all up, and I was like this giant loose cannon and you just absorbed everything, you know? You let me feel all the things I never let myself feel, and it was wonderful and horrible all at once because I’ve never been so free my whole life, but I didn’t know how to handle it and it was so destructive and you liked to tear into me just as much as I tore into you. And don’t say anything, just listen. You were like this whole new world to me, and I was so, so enraptured by you. And I, I, I think I trained myself, you know? I trained myself to lose control around you, and, and I can’t. I can’t do that anymore. I could, he could-,”

“Bruce,” Betty had this look on her face like she was half way between a smile and a sob. “Hulk won’t hurt me. He saved my life twice in a week, even while everyone else was trying to hurt him and it would have been easier for him to just run. He won’t hurt me, because he knows me. You know me, and he can feel that and he-,”

“Shh,” Bruce dropped a kiss on her forehead to silence her. “Shh. See, that’s part of the problem. He knows you through the way I feel for you. And that’s dangerous Betty, because sometimes I, I just, sometimes I just hate you so much. And I-,”

“Sometimes I hate you, too,” she confesses, and she really does sob this time and he holds her tight against him and it just hurts. They’re both hurting and Bruce can’t quite figure out if being this close is soothing or if it’s hurting more. “I don’t want to lose you again,” Betty cries as his fingers clench in the fabric of her blouse. “I can’t lose you again.”

And Bruce blinks back tears and the flash of green that overtakes his vision, because fuck, this just isn’t fair. It’s not fair that this happened to her, or to him, and he can’t figure out why it has to hurt so much and why he has to need it to. He squeezes her against him and noses into her hair and tries to calm himself, but it’s so hard when she’s sobbing and shaking in his arms. He still wants to give her everything, all of him. His voice is rough, and he doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want to close this door, but somebody has to and Betty had always been too stubborn, so he says with as much conviction as he can muster, “We can’t keep doing this.” It sounds rough and broken, even to him.

“We can reverse your social conditioning,” Betty begs, wet and desperate. “We can teach you to be calm and in control around me, and I can learn to back off some. We can work through this. It’s just, it’s just like science, right? We can run tests and experiments and-,”

“Haven’t we hurt each other enough?”

Betty stills against him, and they’re both holding their breaths. Neither moves, not even to shift their weight, and for a brief moment Bruce thinks she’ll say that no, they haven’t hurt each other enough. That they’ll never hurt each other enough, and that she wants to keep at it, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if that’s the case. He doesn’t want to keep hurting her, and he doesn’t want to keep being hurt, but if she refuses to let go he doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to fight it. She is just as inevitable as reaching the ocean by walking along a riverbank, and he doesn’t think he’s strong enough to fight the natural flow of things if she were to drag him back in. But then she says, “I guess we have,” and she sounds just as broken as he did, and he’s just so relieved.

It hurts. It hurts like somebody reached into his chest and pulled out one of his lungs, but he’s so relieved. For once maybe they can see eye to eye and stay away from each other. For once, maybe it’s enough that neither of them are drowning.

“I’m sorry.” The words are nothing more than the breath of a whisper, and he doesn’t know who said them or who they are meant for, but he knows they’re true. Betty presses into him briefly before pulling away. Her eyes are red and puffy, and his are tired and a little green around the edges even though he doesn’t really feel too angry. He watches as she crosses the room, skirts around the water and broken glass, and puts her shoe back on. She grabs her coat off the back of a chair and wraps herself up in it, then grabs her purse off the seat and slings it over her shoulder.

“I’ll walk you out,” he whispers as he reaches for her, but she shakes her head. His hand falls back to his side, and his eyes never leave her as she makes her way to the door. She pauses at the threshold and turns back to him once more. They look at each other, and it feels like goodbye, like forever, like the last time he’ll ever see her, but he can’t bring himself to say anything. A ghost of a smile passes over her lips and echoes in his face, and then she sweeps out the door. He hears the elevator ding and take her away, and he wonders if this is what a beach feels like when the tide goes out.

He wants to follow her. His whole body is tense and ready to run back to her, but he catches himself before he can take that fatal step forward and tells himself to breathe. He looks to the three men sitting on his couch and thinks to himself that his friends are made of mountains, and there is solid ground under his feet, and maybe he doesn’t need to be soaking wet and drowning to feel alive. He thinks maybe if he builds a home for himself far enough from the shore, he’ll forget that the tide always comes back in.


End file.
